AHRQ Releases Hospital Quality Indicators Toolkit

A new toolkit from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ ) is designed to help hospital staff understand AHRQ's quality indicators (QIs) and support them in using QIs to successfully improve quality and patient safety in the hospital setting. The toolkit is a general guide to using improvement methods, with a particular focus on QIs. It focuses on 17 patient safety indicators and 28 inpatient quality indicators.

Tools are organized in 7 sections following a complete improvement process that includes setting priorities and planning for performance improvements on QIs, implementing improvement strategies, and sustaining improvements achieved. The toolkit has undergone a field test, evaluation, and revisions in response to feedback from 6 hospitals.